


a shadow in the moonlight

by demonglass



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Experimental Style, M/M, guess who wrote again instead of doing homework, happy ending with just a lil miscommunication along the way!, hyuck is a dancer! but i barely mention it, sporty boi jeno, that's right it was me, this is an hurt w/o comfort FREE household
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-09-07 12:51:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16854295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/demonglass/pseuds/demonglass
Summary: This year there will be no trophy, no celebration, no cheering during the next match; it’s just over. Jeno has to think about that for a while. Donghyuck thinks with him.





	1. Chapter 1

The floodlights cut off, drenching the field in darkness. Jeno watches the bulbs high above his head glow briefly before even that faint light fades away like the dying embers of his last spring dream. The game has been over for a while now, but he swears he can still hear the whistle ringing in his ears, dashing their chances, only one point away. There will be no trophy, no celebration, no cheering during the next match; it’s just _over_. He’s still now, sitting in the grass, back balanced awkwardly against the smooth curve of the light post. There’s nothing left around him but the echoes of shouts that died at the shrill whistle shattering the air, fading in and out like ghosts slipping through pools of sunlight. Sitting with the ghosts, he’s lonely despite their company (he’s still alone, really).

Then, a crinkle of plastic behind him, the shudder of grass compressed under light feet. He doesn’t dare turn his head for fear it will all be a trick of the wind, a silhouette so vivid in his imagination he brought it to life, but it isn’t. Donghyuck appears in front of him, hands clutched together, as if he’s praying (for all Jeno knows, maybe he is), his hair twisting around behind his neck. He shivers, and Jeno feels the cold, suddenly, hit him like a splash of cold water, like being doused by a wave near the sea. Somehow he hadn’t noticed the air’s sharp chill before.

He wants to ask how long Donghyuck has been there, how much he’d seen, whether he was disappointed by it, but he finds he’s afraid of the answers he might get, so instead says nothing. He can’t bring himself to look away though. Donghyuck’s eyes seem darker tonight, with nothing but the weak light of the moon and the faraway gleam of streetlights in town to make them shine (yet shine they still do). It’s not what Jeno had expected to see; not tonight, not here.

Then, surprising himself even more than Donghyuck, he begins to cry. Hot tears well up in the corners of his eyes (he’s sure they’re darker still than Donghyuck’s) and pour down across his cheeks. His skin burns in the night’s wind, and his chest burns too. He’s not sure what it’s about, exactly, whether it’s all about the game or something else, but his inability to pinpoint the cause does little to stem the ache, or the flow of tears. Donghyuck sinks to his knees, reaches out to touch Jeno’s face, hesitates. It must be the darkness that finally breaks through his doubt, Jeno thinks, when he finally moves the last few inches closer. Jeno won’t lean into the touch (he won’t test that boundary tonight), but his eyes threaten to close as Donghyuck brushes slow fingers against his cheeks, wiping away the damp streaks left by his tears even as they continue to fall. The moment feels long and heavy, then Donghyuck draws his hands back and hesitates again. Jeno wonders what’s going on inside his head to pull him away just as it pushes him in: are his thoughts a speeding whirlwind or are they still, calculating, calm, like the eye of a storm? Again, he doesn’t dare ask.

Maybe it’s the dark of night once more, that tempers Donghyuck’s hesitation then; he leans back into Jeno, and this time he wraps his arms around him, warding off the cold night air and chasing away some of the emptiness; he fills up space like the fleeting ghosts in Jeno’s imagination never could. Jeno’s head falls into Donghyuck’s collar and he brings his arms up and rests them against Donghyuck’s back, holding loosely should he want to move away again, silently wishing he won’t. 

The passage of time is a funny thing; Jeno isn’t sure how long they stay there (could be minutes as easily as it could be seconds), but as his chest rises and falls against Donghyuck’s - as shaky as Donghyuck’s is steady - his eyes finally do fall shut. It isn’t until Donghyuck starts to pull away that he tries to fight it, tries to force his eyes back open before Donghyuck can see what he himself can’t even begin to explain. It’s too late when he finally manages it though, Donghyuck is looking at his heavy lids, his dark eyes, and is barely breathing. It’s not quite cold enough for the clouds of his breath to fog up and dissipate like bubbling sea foam fizzes out when it washes onto sand, but Jeno doesn’t have to see the clouds to know they’re there; he can feel the warmth fan across his skin, just barely grazing him before being swept away by the night’s breeze, slow, not quite as steady as before.

Jeno turns his head to look away, to break the contact before it becomes too much, but Donghyuck turns his head too, and then his face is impossibly close, and the wind is enough to nudge Jeno the rest of the way to him. Their noses brush; Jeno turns his head a little more, and then their lips brush, gentle, faint, fleeting, like the shadows of ghosts on the field behind Donghyuck’s back, like the moments of gold before dusk sinks to darkness, almost as if it were an accident. It feels like a distant memory even as it happens, like a scene from a dream already slipping into the depths of his subconscious as sand slips through fingers no matter how hard they try to hold tight. Donghyuck pulls away first; Jeno feels hotter and colder all at once, drenched in open air once more. So that’s all it took, it seems: one bitter loss on a spring night with the last cool bite of winter; now Donghyuck knows.

They hang there a moment longer, close but not enough, unmoving, puppets on unmanned strings, waiting for something, anything, to make them sway. Then the wind picks up, sweeps between them and sends Donghyuck’s hair reaching up to the dark sky, and Donghyuck follows, pushing himself to his feet. He pauses, hesitant (since when has he been this cautious?), before extending a hand to Jeno. Standing there after Donghyuck has pulled Jeno up and let his hand drop back to his side, words fail them both, and it seems they might remain static, stationary forever, until the headlights of a car at the very end of the street flash by and Jeno remembers that the busses in town only run so late. He picks up his bag, slings it over his shoulder, and heads off in the towards the road. He knows without looking that Donghyuck stands still a moment before deciding to follow after him, and they walk to the nearest bus shelter in silence. It hasn’t ever felt this suffocating before.

The bus rolls to a stop in front of them mercifully quickly, and Jeno boards without delay. Donghyuck trails on behind him, slowly, as if he isn’t sure he even wants to be taken home now. Jeno looks away, casting his gaze out the window to glowing storefronts and the remnants of winter salt on the sidewalks, sparkling where the light hits it. He keeps his eyes trained on the world outside even when Donghyuck finally does settle into the seat beside him; he watches the town dance across the frame of the window like a shifting movie screen when the bus moves on towards the next stop, only tearing his eyes away from the dark, faraway sky when Donghyuck moves again (stands and pats his shoulder in a quick goodbye), to instead watch as his retreating back slips away into the night. Then, when the bus rolls away and Jeno can no longer make out the shadow of Donghyuck’s silhouette, he turn back in on himself, rests his head on the window, and shuts his eyes, left alone once more with nothing but the deep sky, the driver, his thoughts, and his ghosts.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> woo a month later here it finally is!! sorry it took so long i needed a while to figure out how i wanted everything to go down. better late than never tho!

When the bus rolls to a halt at Jeno’s stop, he feels quite like the old pottery bowl on the top of his bookshelf (he’d made it years ago, but over the summer it had fallen down to the rug on his floor and cracked under the glaze, leaving a network of thin splinters viened across it, just below the surface), he feels not quite broken, but like he’s held together only by hardened blue glaze. His chest burns, same as his eyes, and he can feel it squeezing tighter by the minute. But he won’t cry openly over this, he tells himself, at least not here where anyone can see his face awash in the bus’s pale yellow light. He stands, pulls his bag up over his shoulder, and slips off the bus, meeting the cool night air with his arms wrapped tightly across his chest; he doesn’t want to ward off the wind as much as he wants to hold himself together, keep himself from falling apart. 

The thing with Donghyuck (is it friendship, born from so many chilled days meeting by chance at the park down the road from his home, or something else? He’s never quite been sure) has always been fragile. He’s always known that each moment with Donghyuck is one to treasure, as he never knows if there will be another; they had never exchanged numbers, never see more than a passing glance of each other in the school hallways, never even spoken outside the safety of park, fenced off and hidden from the rest of the world by tall trees and a slow winding river. The park may as well have been another world, a pocket of the universe safe from ticking clocks and looming deadlines, safe from Jeno’s parents telling him to focus on his studies instead of training (he’ll never play in university anyway, so it doesn’t matter that it’s the only thing that clears his head when his thoughts swim so violently he fears he’ll drown in them), and safe from the ever-pressing fear of graduating and leaving everything Jeno’s ever known behind for some great wide unknown. 

But all that doesn’t matter now: the season is over, and Donghyuck is gone. Jeno has a crushing, sinking feeling they might never cross paths again after tonight, and the thought adds to the weight on his shoulders, pushing him down as if the Earth has adopted Jupiter’s gravity. His eyes are cast to the ground as he walks down the road, drifting in and out of puddles of street-light, trying not to think of the ephemerality of Donghyuck’s quiet presence in his life, and instead wondering whether his parents will even be home when he gets back, whether they’ll know of his failure already or if he’ll have to tell them the season is over himself, whether they’ll be able to hide their satisfaction that he now has no excuse not to spend all his free hours pouring over formulas and notes to somehow push his grades even higher than they already are. Thinking about his parents hardly makes Jeno feel better, but it beats recalling Donghyuck’s soft touch against his cheeks, the worried look in his dark, moonlit eyes, the faint brush of his lips before he’d pulled away and turned carefully guarded. The memory tears at Jeno’s heart, making its beating stuttered and painful, and he tries to focus on nothing more than the sound of his quiet footsteps to rid the stinging moment from his mind.

For a few minutes, the steady pat of his sneakers against the pavement is the only thing he hears (this road is too narrow for many cars, especially at night), until another set of footsteps from far behind him hit his ears. He stops under a street light and, hardwired from every drama he’s ever seen, and countless articles about the dangers of travelling alone at night to be wary of lurking strangers, turns to see if he can make out who it is. His face is painted golden from the glowing old bulb overhead as he squints at the figure at the end of the street, but whoever’s there is shrouded in darkness, and squinting does little to help. Jeno takes a halting step backwards, mind buzzing; he’s not far from his house, and he can make it there sprinting if he needs to, but he’d also feel silly running if it’s just another person walking down the road. He’s on edge tonight though, so he takes another, bigger step back and decides he’ll speed-walk the rest of the way home, no harm in that, right? But he freezes mid-turn as the shadowed figure calls out his name and he realizes it’s no stranger at all. 

“Donghyuck?” He whispers, disbelieving even as Donghyuck hurries forward through a pool of yellow lamplight and his unmistakable face is lit up like the sun. “What are you doing here?” Jeno asks, voice just as quiet as before, when Donghyuck closes the distance between them and comes to a stop in front of him.

For a moment, Donghyuck doesn’t say anything, just looks at Jeno, intent; his eyes roam across Jeno’s face, from the curve of his jaw to his red cheeks, then up the slope of his nose to settle on his eyes, wide and searching. “I just . . .” Donghyuck hesitates, slips his hands into his jacket pockets. “I was walking home and realized that I needed to talk to you. Now. Tonight. I’d thought it would be better to wait until everything settled, but I think that would have made it harder. If I don’t do this now I don’t know if I’ll get the chance again.”

Jeno’s heart hammers in his chest and his mind has already churned up a dozen possible outcomes to this, and by far the most terrifying is the one he fears will come to pass: that Donghyuck will tell him in no uncertain words that he doesn’t feel the same, and doesn’t want to see him anymore. “Make what harder?” He forces himself to ask, and his voice sounds painfully small even to him.

Donghyuck takes a deep breath, pulls a hand out of his pocket to run it through his hair. Jeno’s eyes track the motion against his will before snapping back to Donghyuck’s glowing face. “Earlier, at the field, when you . . .” Donghyuck trails off and wets his lips nervously. Jeno’s traitorous eyes are briefly stuck on the sight, and he feels his heart sink in his chest. Donghyuck takes another breath. “When you kissed me, I was scared.” 

Jeno opens his mouth to say something, anything, but Donghyuck holds a hand up and he deflates, remains silent. “I was scared,” Donghyuck starts again, “because I was worried that you were just upset about the game and weren’t thinking. I was scared you only kissed me because you were sad and I was there, not because you actually wanted to.” Donghyuck drags in another breath, shaking. “I didn’t want you to kiss me if it didn’t mean anything to you because it meant too much to me.”

Jeno blinks slowly, staring wide-eyed at Donghyuck. He barely dares to breathe. “Really?” 

Donghyuck nods, his eyes searching Jeno’s face again.

“Oh.” Jeno lets out a breath and shrugs his bag off his shoulders, letting it drop the the ground at his feet. “I was scared too,” he says softly, taking a step closer to Donghyuck. He smiles, small, hesitant. “Because it wasn’t nothing, Donghyuck. It meant a lot to me too.”

Realization lights upon Donghyuck’s face like a shining, golden dawn, and then he smiles, small, soft, too. It’s the most beautiful thing Jeno has seen in ages, and suddenly his troubles seem incredibly small, and far, far away. He takes another step forward until he and Donghyuck are toe to toe and his vision tunnels so Donghyuck’s glowing skin and sparkling eyes are the only thing he can see. 

“I don’t think I’m scared anymore,” Donghyuck says, reaching a hand out to take Jeno’s.

Jeno nods slowly and his eyes skip down to Donghyuck’s lips. He takes Donghyuck’s waist with his free hand, gently pulls him closer. “Neither am I,” he breathes, and then he kisses Donghyuck again, for real this time.

Donghyuck’s lips are smooth and soft; they taste faintly of some kind of berry, and move across Jeno’s with all the grace but none of the restraint Donghyuck has when he dances in both school and company recitals, and Jeno can’t help but think this moment, with Donghyuck’s hand lighting on the back of his neck and his kiss taking Jeno’s breath away, is worth every second of the stifling silence on the bus ride, every sharp pang of fear and uncertainty that had stung him up until this very moment. Jeno leans down into Donghyuck’s arms and forgets everything but the warmth of his body and the gentle press of his lips. There will be much to figure out when they finally break apart, much to ask and much to say, but right now, this is it; this kiss in the lamplight, this moment with Donghyuck, this is all he needs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hope you enjoyed this! i really said fuck studying for my exam tomorrow i'm gonna bust out the rest of this oneshot sdfgh and like it was worth it but I'd still appreciate kudos or comments to soothe my soul if i bomb my physics final tomorrow!

**Author's Note:**

> .....i wrote this again from a prompt but i didn't mean for it to get so sad??? so like,, lmk if you want a second part where it resolves happily bc i would do it in a heartbeat.


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